Atomic Systems

Right, I've just about finished, after a helluva lot of work, Part 2 of Ye'll Hev Hed Yerr Tea, which is (was?) a fairly intricate activity involving a fair bit of shunting, consist assembly, working request stops (oh yes), interlinked activity events etc. etc. (and some quite interesting motive power). Have just finished alpha-testing it and was just amending a couple of the message texts in the Activity Editor, when AE crashes (send/don't send) when I attempt to save.

Now the crash appears to have corrupted the .act file totally, to the extent that as soon as I try to go into the "Editors and Tools" selection screen, I get "Failed loading activity headers - Continue Yes/No", and attempting to open the activity in AE crashes it with "send/don't send".

Opening the .act file in a text editor shows clearly why: the file is now only 1KB large and contains nothing whatsoever other than:

SIMISA@@@@@@@@@@

Deep f***ing joy.

Just how shafted am I? And please don't ask whether I had a back up.

The path and service files still seem to be OK - if I have lost my activity, presumably I can at least re-use them? That said, to be honest I don't think I can bring myself to do the whole thing again - every message and static consist etc etc.

Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot, each

Commiserations! It looks as though hours and hours of work may have gone down the pan. Hard to describe! Is there any chance that system restore may help? I've no idea whether it would catch an .act file though. Mark

I'll echo that sentiment, I've been there done it and got the t-shirt to prove it, if you've still got the paths and services you should still have the traffic files, and the static consists would have been saved, so it should'nt take too long to set it all back up again, and re-write the messages.

Aye, I feared as much. Sod it all to Ipswich and back.

Think I'll delay re-writing the activity until I've finished my class 21. Might be less depressed once i've achieved that...

If you are writing large or complicated activities a useful habit to get into is to do a Save As on the activity when you reach a point where something you've been working on works OK and save the file as v1, v2 etc.

For example, if you set up the basic info for the activity and save it as v1, then get all your AI traffic inserted with timings that work and then Save As v2 you can always drop back to the earlier v1 that you know works if something goes pear shaped later on with the newer v2.

Aye. I know...................................................................................

Save as isn't really that useful, because it will only save the ACT file - for instance if you continue modifiying traffic the TRF file will still change, so you won't be able to revert exactly.

What I do is "pack" the activity as a backup, that does then save all the PAT SRV files as well as the ACT and ASV, and any CONsists. It did save my bacon once when I accidently pressed "delete" instead of "use as template" on a rather complicated path!

Alan